Germaine Greer first impinged on my own life in my final year as an undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. We women students were all gathered together in the college hall for the annual Founder's Day Feast, and as we finished eating, the principal called us to order for the speeches. As a hush descended, one person continued to speak, too engrossed in her conversation to notice, her strong Australian voice reverberating round the room.

At the graduates' table, Germaine was explaining with passion that there could be no liberation for women, no matter how highly educated, as long as we were required to cram our breasts into bras constructed like mini-Vesuviuses two stitched, white, cantilevered cones which bore no resemblance to the female anatomy. The willingly suffered discomfort of the Sixties bra, she opined vigorously, was a hideous symbol of male oppression.

I'd like to be able to recall that we hallooed and thumped the tables, or that we erupted into a spontaneous roar of approval, a guffaw of sisterly laughter. We should have done, but we didn't. We were too astonished at the very idea that a woman could speak so loudly and out of turn, and that words such as 'bra' and 'breasts' (or maybe she said 'tits') could be uttered amid the pseudo-masculine solemnity of a college dinner. I am embarrassed to remember how sheltered we were then, how closed our vocabularies and our minds.

Four years later, in 1970, The Female Eunuch changed all that. Every self-respecting woman on the Left owned a copy - still owns a copy - somewhere around the house, dog-eared and coffee-stained with use. Greer's detractors may pooh-pooh its influence, but the fact is that for women born in the immediate postwar years there was 'before Greer' and 'after Greer'. The book, and Germaine's attention-grabbing brand of stand-up-comic, in-your-face assertiveness, taught us all how to behave badly and take control of our lives. She was Mae West, Dorothy Parker and Gertrude Stein rolled into one, with a touch of the self-parodying Lenny Henrys.

Her epoch-making book had an enduring impact because it and she were outrageous, bad and dangerous, and, above all, hilariously funny. And all you girl-power grrrrls out there who claim you never read her, so she didn't make a difference for you, can stop kidding yourselves. You are standing on her statuesque shoulders; she did it first.

Almost 30 years on, the question is, can she possibly do it again? In The Whole Woman, Greer picks up where she left off, with the very same woman she taught us was threatened by everything that was happening around 1970: our original self, deformed and mutilated by the pressure to mimic that 'femininity' to which men insisted we conform. Let's have another try at rescuing the castrated woman, Greer seems to be saying. Forget anything I've written in between, the digressions, the changes of heart, and return to the roots of the debate.

At a literal level, on the page, The Whole Woman adopts the same format, same section headings, recapitulates many of the same questions as The Female Eunuch. 'It's time to get angry again.' Either Greer believes that at 60 she is wise enough to figure out how to be that 'whole woman', or she has been forced to write the sequel she said she would never write, because things are as bad as ever they were, and somebody loud and cussed needs to get up and say so.

In truth, both these agendas are there in The Whole Woman. At the level of man's deranged quest for a manufactured 'woman' to serve his sexual fantasies, and the damage done thereby to women driven by the desire to please whatever it may cost them, things have, according to Greer, got worse: 'When The Female Eunuch was written, our daughters were not cutting or starving themselves.' 'Is there really a concerted campaign afoot now,' she asks, 'with a view to increasing women's dissatisfaction with themselves?' And her answer is a qualified yes. More than ever, women are being persuaded that without the intervention of male technology they are incompetent as women.

Greer shows us the devastating ways in which the health industry talks women into having their bodies and their reproductive systems 'managed', in conformity with man-made scenarios and understanding. She describes the facts behind in vitro fertilisation: its high failure rate, the side-effects, the lasting psychological damage on the would-be mother of having her fertility technologically manipulated. She points out the mismatch between the 'success' of breast implants in achieving the 'perfect' mammary for men as against the failure of equivalent medical technology to detect and treat increasingly prevalent breast cancer. She questions the benefits of, and reveals the calamities caused by, cervical smear screening.

At the same time, Greer's polemic today has the confidence of maturity. The Whole Woman is a more positive book than The Female Eunuch. It acknowledges that in the last 30 years women have come a long, long way; women's lives are 'nobler and richer', even though they are 'fiendishly difficult'. It celebrates communities of women, liberated from the tiresome need to please men. Men have taken themselves off elsewhere in search of the fantasy woman with incredibly long legs, no butt and bazooka breasts 'suspended from the ear-lobes just about the level of the collar-bone'. In that case, 'natural' women can get on with fulfilling lives of their own, unencumbered by guilt.

Such free women are at liberty to love to the full without sex, to 'be erotically interested in people of either sex or uninterested in genital contact with either'. And some day her princess may come: 'None of us needs lose hope that she may yet meet the woman of her dreams and love as she has never loved before.'

So, what does The Whole Woman offer today's women? Characteristically, Greer ducks prescriptive formulations. 'I am an anarchist, basically,' she told me this week. 'I don't think the future lies in constraining people to do stuff they're not good at, and don't want to do.' Aspiring to equality with men is a terrible mistake, since men 'live and work in a frighteningly unfree and tyrannical society', one built on 'confederacies and conspiracies, on initiation and blooding rituals, on shared antisocial behaviour, on ostracisms and punishments, practical jokes, clannishness and discrimination'. Similarly, she shrugs off 'girl power'. Being laddish, out-drinking the boys, diminishes women, instead of harnessing their natural strengths.

Those strengths are in the areas of life which Seventies and Eighties feminism turned away from. The message of The Whole Woman is that women should reclaim with gusto to the domains of their traditional self-confidence their intact bodies, their flexibility, their capacity to accommodate change. They should celebrate their big-hipped, uncontrollable, menstruating bodies, make art and poetry out of their 'pulsing, glistening female entrails'. Sounds a bit earth-motherish? Perhaps. But don't underestimate this book. Its power, like that of The Female Eunuch, lies in the virtuosity and wit of its questions, its capacity to force us to stop and think. Time alone will supply the answers.